Mr and Mrs Alfred Wilsey
Matthew Kelly
Jeanine Willi Markie
(note; caption on rear of photo was not very clear, in particular is the final name)

Mr and Mrs Alfred Wilsey
Matthew Kelly
Jeanine Willi Markie
(note; caption on rear of photo was not very clear, in particular is the final name)

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Dede Wilsey models a necklace designed by Harry Winston, for her husband Al Wilsey ALSO RAN 01/07/02 CAT

Dede Wilsey models a necklace designed by Harry Winston, for her husband Al Wilsey ALSO RAN 01/07/02 CAT

Photo: JOHN O'HARA

Memoir by son of S.F. socialites should set tongues wagging -- and other writers say it's not just trash talk

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San Francisco's high-society types are accustomed to life in the spotlight, but a new tell-all memoir is about to put them under the microscope as never before.

"Oh the Glory of It All," the coming-of-age story of troubled rich kid Sean Wilsey, won't arrive in bookstores until mid-May, but it's already the talk of the party circuit -- and is likely to become the juiciest gossip in years when the book is excerpted in the New Yorker in its April 11 issue, hitting newsstands this week.

The 475-page memoir, to be published by Penguin Press, has it all, from sex, drugs and marital infidelity to famous names, lavish parties and conspicuous consumption. It also has Wilsey's painful quest for love, understanding and acceptance from his mother, former San Francisco Examiner society columnist Pat Montandon; his late father, philanthropist and food magnate Al Wilsey; and in particular, his stepmother, Diane "Dede" Wilsey, one of the city's most powerful and admired arts patrons, who led the 10-year- effort to build the $202 million new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.

"I don't think you can overestimate the size of the mushroom cloud that will appear over Pacific Heights," said author Armistead Maupin, whose 1976 serial "Tales of the City" provided a fictional mirror for real-life San Francisco personalities. "There hasn't been a wicked stepmother like that since 'Cinderella.' " Maupin read the book and has supplied a cover blurb for it.

Dede Wilsey, born Diane Dow Buchanan, was the great-granddaughter of the founder of Dow Chemical Co. Her first husband was steamship executive John Traina, whom she met in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Her father had been an ambassador to Luxembourg and Austria, and chief of protocol to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. She divorced Traina in 1980 and married Al Wilsey, divorced by then from Montandon, in May 1981. Sean Wilsey wrote that novelist Danielle Steel had an affair with Al Wilsey, but when she lost out to Dede, married Traina "as a consolation prize" in June 1981.

In his book, 34-year-old Sean Wilsey blames his stepmother for the breakup of his parents' marriage, and, in part, for his spiral into delinquency. His parents, he writes, were so narcissistic they didn't have time to nurture him.

Dede Wilsey said she has no intention of reading the memoir. "A fact checker from the New Yorker called the other day, and every fact they checked with me was wrong," she said.

Nonetheless, "we've had a good relationship," she said of Sean, "especially once he came back from the school in Italy, once he was happier with himself. Al and I were very proud of him. I wish him well."

As happens with some memoirs, author and subject appear to be in two polarized camps, with Wilsey's friends protecting him and his stepmothers' friends protectively closing ranks around her.

Penguin Press would not allow Sean Wilsey to grant interviews before the book's release. However, Montandon, reached by telephone at her home in Beverly Hills, said that she had read it and that her son was brave to write it.

"I love that quality in anybody because I think you have to be brave to tell the truth in life," Montandon said. "Sean has every right in the world to write his story, and I applaud him for it, 100 percent." She declined to address specifics in the memoir.

But Harry de Wildt, a fixture on the San Francisco society scene for 38 years, was simultaneously curious about and dismissive of the memoir.

"I'm surprised I'm in the book -- I wouldn't know Sean Wilsey if he walked in my front door," said de Wildt, a Hollander known for his witty one- liners and scathing put-downs. "If I saw a book in that bookstore with that title, I'd think it was about an Indian princess covered with emeralds, or a memoir about some war general on the winning side. I don't think that Dede would pay attention, and I don't think she should. As Herb Caen used to say, 'There's nothing older than yesterday's news.' "

San Francisco jet-setter Denise Hale, who was once married to Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli, has seen her share of friends become the subject of tell-all books.

"In my opinion, most of these books are written for one of three reasons -- money, self-aggrandizement or a vendetta," she said. "And follow this one: A personal recollection is not a fact."

Dede Wilsey is excoriated for roughly one-third of Wilsey's book.

He writes that Dede Traina was his mother's best friend and suggests his father had been involved with her romantically for some time before his breakup with Montandon.

The divorce of Wilsey and Montandon after 10 years of marriage was -- at the time -- one of the most expensive divorce cases in San Francisco history. Montandon was awarded $20,000 a month, which she said was too little to maintain the lifestyle to which she'd become accustomed. Her bid for $57, 000 a month was rejected in court, and the judge advised her to get a job.

"If your mother had cared as much about being a wife as she did about being a star, we'd still be married," Al Wilsey told his son after moving into the Fairmont Hotel, according to the book.

Sean Wilsey alleges that his stepmother did not allow him or his stepbrothers from Wilsey's previous marriages to view their father's will.

The author's feelings toward his stepmother careen wildly from veneration to venom: He adored her until he was sent off to boarding school and then several reform schools. He began to fantasize about her sexually as a teenager, trying to see her through his father's eyes. As an adult, he began to stand up to what he describes as her verbal put-downs.

Dede Wilsey isn't the only one taken to task. Sean Wilsey writes that his father was too busy with his new family -- Dede and her sons, Trevor and Todd Traina -- and building a fortune with his Wilsey Bennett Co., a dairy business that manufactured edible oils, margarines and foil-wrapped butter pats, to pay attention to him. Al Wilsey also invested in real estate with developer Gerson Bakar. Sean Wilsey was Al Wilsey's third son, from his third marriage. (By the time Al Wilsey died of respiratory failure in 2002, father and son appeared to have reached a loving accord.)

Sean Wilsey is hard on his mother, Montandon, a beauty from Oklahoma once squired by Frank Sinatra, because she was always trying to be a somebody.

When she'd come to San Francisco in 1960, she was divorced from an Air Force major. She got a job at I. Magnin, married and divorced again and threw theme parties for the social set that attracted media attention. There was a sham wedding to trial lawyer Melvin Belli (who'd represented Jack Ruby) in a Shinto ceremony in Japan that was annulled after 36 days; Montandon wanted the marriage to be official, but Belli refused to have it legally recorded. Then Montandon became hostess of a TV show, where she caught Al Wilsey's eye. They married in 1969. She hosted roundtable luncheons with the likes of Eldridge Cleaver, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. From 1979 to 1982, she was the society columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.

But she didn't handle stress well. Despondent about her divorce from Al Wilsey, she urged her 11-year-old son to jump with her to their deaths from their penthouse at 999 Green St. "That'd show your dad," Wilsey recalled her saying, in the book. "We'll teach him a lesson together." She also told her son that she had cancer and would "be dead by Christmas," but mysteriously, lived on -- with no explanation as to her recovery.

In 1982, Wilsey writes, his mother helped author Jerry Jampolsky promote his book, "Children as Teachers for Peace." As an outgrowth, she formed a movement (now known as Children as the Peacemakers) and began trotting the globe with children of various races and her son, orchestrating meetings with leaders such as Indira Gandhi, Menachem Begin, even the pope, in her quest for world harmony and a Nobel Prize, Wilsey writes.

But ultimately, Wilsey made his peace with Montandon; he dedicates the book to her.

As tough as he was on his parents and stepmother, he was also tough on himself. He recounts how he repeatedly promised his parents he would behave and stay out of trouble -- and repeatedly broke those promises. He did drugs, got in fights at boarding school, stole money and even took his uncle's gun, at one point. Wilsey's chapters about life at boarding school examine the power struggles among students. It seems that no matter where he lived, whether in reform school or high society life, people were jockeying for power -- and Wilsey was terrible at understanding and following the rules. When he did return home periodically in the 1980s, his mother threw him out of the house; his father's patience wears thin.

But though they threatened to give up on him, his mother, Montandon, and his father continued to support him financially, ever trying to find a new school that would set him straight. It was at Amity, a now-defunct reform school in Tuscany, that Wilsey was transformed.

Early in life, he decided that emotions "had made my mom crazy, and I would not succumb to that." Repressing his emotions caused anger, rage and hate, but at Amity, he writes, he found a tenderness in the teaching program that allowed him to open up. "To quote my dad, 'That school was a salvation for you. It saved you,' " Wilsey writes.

While Wilsey is not the kind of household name that will automatically make his story a blockbuster, Penguin Press appears to be counting on Wilsey's story to have more than Bay Area appeal.

What does the story tell readers about high-society life? There are no sociological pronouncements made. Reading between the lines, a reader could glean that rich people have problems, just like everyone else, but have the money to solve their troubles differently -- sending problem children out of their lives, in hopes that someone else can fix them.

Or that rich people have cliques, just like everyone else, but because so few people are so very rich, the pool of friends and prospective spouses is small, making for lots of interconnected relationships. Or that life in high society is about power and status, so everybody is always trying to position himself as a success -- or at least, avoid offending the powerful, for fear of being shut out of the scene. Unless you're Sean Wilsey, who wrote a book and is bringing it all out into the open.

Penguin Press has already devoted considerable energy to a pre-publicity tour with independent booksellers, which are generally intended to garner favorable word of mouth that can build and propel a book to higher visibility in chain stores across the country. A national book-signing tour is scheduled to follow.

On March 22, local booksellers gathered at the Presidio for a private meet-and-greet with Wilsey, an editor at large at McSweeney's Quarterly -- a hip, nationally distributed literary magazine co-founded by San Francisco author Dave Eggers.

Sean Wilsey's charming manner, the quality of his writing and his connection to McSweeney's will lend an already compelling story some extra cachet, booksellers said, as will the bird's-eye view into the lifestyles of the rich, if not famous.

"Yes, it's set in San Francisco, and those of us who've lived here a long time know many of the characters and wonder how they'll feel about different parts of the book, but it's a universal story," said Elaine Petrocelli, co- owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera. "At times we are revolted by what he did, and other times we're in his corner cheering for him. He's a very complicated character who had a complicated childhood and turned it around. San Francisco is a character here, as is Tuscany. But this could have happened to a kid anywhere. The strength of the book is that Sean Wilsey is a terrific writer."

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books has already lined up Wilsey for an appearance in May. Wendy Sheanin, events manager at the store, said that anything associated with McSweeney's or bearing the word McSweeney's pricks the interest of readers. "The people who are in McSweeney's are rising stars. "

In his book-jacket blurb, Eggers, whom the New York Times recently suggested is "the (George) Plimpton of his generation," called the book "the most compulsively readable book I've picked up in years."

As soon as people start reading "Oh the Glory of It All," which reconstructs conversations and gives his version of his life history to date, they'll begin debating whether his views are accurate or not. But two people can be in the same place at the same time and come away with two different perceptions of reality.

Presumably, when the press tour begins, Wilsey, who is married, has a son and lives in New York, will explain the motivation for the book, whose release roughly coincides with the final stages of completion of the new de Young.

Do memoirists -- especially those with dark secrets to tell -- necessarily do so for revenge? And was this book written for revenge? Maupin doesn't think so.

"It's not a gossipy tell-all, it's a coming-of-age story about a child surviving a life of conspicuous consumption," Maupin said in a telephone interview from New York, where a film based on his latest novel, "The Night Listener," is being filmed with Robin Williams and Toni Collette.

"What's impressive is the degree to which he acknowledges the good and the bad in both sets of parents," Maupin said. "He's simply trying to cast an honest eye on himself and his family. That's the most powerful kind of memoir. "

Who's who? Mapping out the many Wilsey family ties, from Sean to Danielle Steel

Sean Wilsey

The author of "Oh the Glory of It All." Son of Pat Montandon and the late Al Wilsey, stepson of Dede Wilsey. Society brat grows up, stops throwing oranges at cars on Russian Hill and escapes to the East Coast. He now works as an editor at large for McSweeney's, co-founded by Dave Eggers.

Al Wilsey

Deceased. Married four times. Father of Sean Wilsey and sons Michael and Ladd Wilsey from previous marriages. Stepfather to Todd and Trevor Traina. His millions came from his Wilsey Bennett Co., which manufactured edible oils, margarines and butter pats, and also from real estate investments.

Pat Montandon

Mother of Sean Wilsey. Model, TV hostess, society columnist and author. After her marriage to Al Wilsey went south, Montandon went East -- to Egypt, the Vatican and Russia -- with a children's brigade advocating world peace. Now living in Los Angeles, she's writing her own memoir.

Dede Wilsey

Stepmother of Sean Wilsey. Formerly married to John Traina, who went on to marry Danielle Steel after Dede Wilsey married Al. In recent years, Wilsey has become one of the top tier socialites in San Francisco and the unstoppable force behind the construction of the new de Young Museum, which one wag in town has taken to calling the "Dede Young."

Todd and Trevor Traina

Stepbrothers of Sean Wilsey. Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who sold his technology venture compare.net to Microsoft, is a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums. Todd Traina is a film producer.

Danielle Steel

Romance novelist. She married John Traina after his divorce from Dede. Steel and Traina split up in 1995.

To read an interview with Sean Wilsey, author of "Oh the Glory of It All," log on to www.newyorker.com.

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